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Toxic worlds and the power of denial

SYSNO ASEP	0556775
Document Type	U - Organizing Conference, Workshop, Exhibition
R&D Document Type	W - Uspořádání workshopu
R&D Document Type	Není vybrán druh dokumentu
Title	Toxic worlds and the power of denial
Author(s)	Gibas, Petr (SOU-Z)_{RID, ORCID, SAI}
Event type	W - Workshop
Event date	19.04.2022 - 19.04.2022
VEvent location	Praha (online)
Country	CZ - Czech Republic
Event type	EUR
Total number of participants	30
Number of foreign participants	20
Language	eng - English
Keywords	toxic waste ; pollution ; home ; more-than-human dwelling
Subject RIV	AO - Sociology, Demography
OECD category	Sociology
Institutional support	SOU-Z - RVO:68378025
Annotation	Bureaucrats and politicians have long turned a blind eye to the accumulation of small toxic doses in soils, groundwater, oceans and in bodies. Toxic waste from industrial processes have been tolerated as a price to pay for living 'progress' and 'growth'. Anthropologists are interested in the capacity of humans to render invisible and deny the toxic evidence, and in the stubborn refusal to observe and understand the real materiál consequences of our economic and technical system. Denial makes the invisible traces and effects of the catastrophe disappear. A powerful weapon, it allows to normalize a situation in a way that reproduces rational logic while producing a deep abandonment to the evil of non-reflection. To speak of pollution is to recognize its immense power to render a hitherto familiar space uninhabitable. Ethnographic fieldwork shows that chemical relations do not begin and end where the chemical industry and the state think they do. Instead of following bureaucratic reasoning and official science, it seeks to understand the intimate experiences that men and women have with toxic products and pollution. Nuclear power, pesticides, mining projects, everyday chemicals, industrial waste, plastics, the Seveso disaster are taken by their effects on bodies, and by the way they reflect and accentuate social, gender, class and racial inequalities. The reasoning of the bodies calls for a universal right to breath.
Workplace	Institute of Sociology
Contact	Eva Nechvátalová, eva.nechvatalova@soc.cas.cz, Tel.: 222 220 924 / linka 351
Year of Publishing	2023

Number of the records: 1